Please contact instructor for course description.

LTAF 110 Africa

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LTAM 110 The Americas

Asian Americans occupy a contradictory place in American culture. On the one hand, they are celebrated as overachieving model minorities on the other hand, they are demonized as threatening yellow perils. Even as Asian Americans garner increased media visibility in recent years, embraced as "crazy rich Asians" and courageous martial arts heroines, they continue to be targets of xenophobic violence, branded as vectors of disease. The course explores how filmmakers have responded to this simultaneous acceptance and rejection. Directors have protested the toxic media representation of Asian Americans as well as articulated the pleasure and joy of Asian American lives. We will study a range of media genres, including narrative fiction, documentary, experimental shorts, and digital media. Films may include Who Killed Vincent Chin? (1987), History and Memory (1991), Better Luck Tomorrow (2002), Refugee (2003), Saving Face (2004), Call Her Ganda (2018), Crazy Rich Asians (2018), Lingua Franca (2019), and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). Assignments may include short film analyses, a midterm, and a final video essay.

LTCS 119

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

LTCS 172

This class is an introduction to the analysis of literary and historical text using computational methods. The course is designed for students who have already some knowledge of programming and want to use such skills to better understand humanistic texts and data. The class uses the Python programming language.

The course is articulated around projects that students begin developing from the beginning of the quarter (either in groups or individually) and is organized into five modules. In the first, students familiarize themselves with basic techniques of text mining of humanities data. In the second module, students apply social network theory (graph theory) to literary and historical texts. Using python libraries for the modeling of social networks, students learn to formalize social relationships of fictional and historical characters, specifically how actors relate to each other in a text. In the third module, students become familiarized with vector space models that can be used to identify similarities among texts and classify documents according to topics, literary genre, and authorship. In the fourth module, students are introduced to the use and processing of tabular humanistic data, using the library, Pandas. The fifth module is an introduction the extraction and analysis of Named Entity in literary and historical texts: named entities are nouns that refer to things in real and fictional worlds. In the final part of the course, students are introduced to the modeling of topics in literary texts.

This course offers an introduction to the study of Japanese films. This course pays close attention to the languages and styles of films as well as the historical and socio-cultural contexts. The primary goal of this course is to learn how to read formal and historical aspects of films and develop the ability to talk about films in critical terms.

LTEA 138

LTEA 138 Asia

Colonial Korea in Literary and Cinematic Representations. This course traces modern Korean history of the colonial period (1910-1945) through examination of short fictions, novels and films produced between the first decade of Japanese rule and the 2010s.  Major issues we will examine through our reading of literary and filmic texts include the following: Japanese colonization, impact of Marxism, Cultural Nationalism, colonial diasporas, modernism and traditionalism, gender and coloniality/nationalism, the rise of mass culture and consumerism, imperialization policies and collaboration, and changing South Korean conceptualizations of the colonial history. We will attempt to re-think the emergence of “Korea” as a modern nation-state transnationally, i.e., in relation to the regional and global historical changes that include imperial dominations, colonial capitalization, dissemination of ideologies such as liberalism, Marxism and nationalism, and multi-directional flows of culture, commodities and people. In addition to literary texts from the 1910, 20s and 30s, we will also study films made in the late colonial period under the imperialization policy as well as the cinematic representations of colonial Korea produced in South Korea in the late 1990s and 2010s.  Our examination of South Korean cultural productions from recent years will allow us to conceptualize the historicity and changing significance of Japanese colonialism in the contemporary world.

LTEA 140 Asia

This course is a survey of literary and cinematic representations of women, femininities and the historical waves of feminist movements in modern Korea, spanning from the colonial period to the contemporary era.  We will read and view major literary works and films, paying close attention to the centrality of gender and sexuality in these works’ conceptualization of the broader historical issues such as Japanese colonialism, the national division/ the U.S. occupation, the Korean War, South Korean participation in the Vietnam War, military dictatorships, labor and dissident movements, and multiethnicization of South Korea. Alongside and beyond the representative masculinist literary and cinematic representations of modern Korean history by both male and female writers, we will examine feminist/female re-inscriptions. 

LTEA 143 Asia

This course explores the fashioning of Filipino identities and communities, with a focus on the (rough) period between the end of the nineteenth century and the early 21st. Throughout the quarter we will trace legacies of Spanish and US colonialism, Philippine post-independence (1946) expressions of cultural identity and difference (“Spanish,” “Asian,” “native,” and so forth), and the impact of global diaspora, the economics of care labor, and the politics of memory and forgetting. Our exploration culminates in a study of how Filipino intellectuals, politicians, and artists grappled with this colonial legacy after the Philippines became an “independent” national republic (after World War II) setting the stage for Martial Law under President Marcos, on the one hand, and the labor diaspora of Filipinos to the US and (increasingly) other countries, on the other. Course requirements include attendance, participation, short responses (200 words), one group oral presentation, and two papers of increasing length (<> 1500 and 2000 words respectively).

LTEA 152B Asia

This course offers an introduction to literatures written in English in Britain and Ireland between 1660 and 1832. It is one of the six required lower-division courses for the Literatures in English major, and open to anyone interested in the literature and culture of this period. We will focus on major works by representative writers, without making any pretense toward systematic coverage of an era that extends for more than a century. This period of British history witnessed the growth of London into a major metropolis, the gradual move toward representative democracy, and the expansion of Britain’s overseas empire (albeit with the loss of the American colonies). In the first half of the course we will focus on literary responses to Britain’s growing imperial power. Readings will include Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and excerpts of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative. We turn to Romanticism in the second half of the course, reading selected poetry by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, and Keats, together with several works by women, including excerpts of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Narrating Our Americas: In this survey of literatures written in the U.S. since the Civil War, we’ll take as our theme “Narrating Our Americas,” reconsidering the concept of “America” and the Americas as a way of posing a number of questions about the relationship between U.S. literature and American national identity.  In particular, we will trace the development of national consciousness across 150+ years, considering how literary texts, from late nineteenth-century populism to early twenty-first century popular culture, have constructed competing and often contradictory understandings of U.S. culture.   We’ll pay particular attention to the evolution of national identity in relation to major social and economic transformations such as industrialization, migration, and urbanization to explosive cultural developments like the introduction of mass consumer technologies of film and television and to radical political reorientations through broad-scale movements like anti-racist struggles, feminist movements, and workers’ rights.  Our goal will be to conceive of the literary in dynamic relation to the cultural and political history of the U.S. since 1865, to ask how these literary texts offer their own visions of U.S. history, and to consider how these visions might productively challenge and radically reshape our notions of Americanness in the twenty-first century.

Survey of Native American and Indigenous Literature. This course introduces students to the field of Indigenous literary studies. We will read work from an array of authors whose writings span hundreds of years and cover multiple geographic regions and Indigenous affiliations. Driving our discussion of these texts are a set of key questions: What is Indigenous literature? How does it differ from other genres? What is the value in thinking about Indigenous literature as a specific canon or body of writing? 

The Canterbury Tales (a).  What was it like to live the wake of the Black Death pandemic and the social, political and economic upheaval it caused? We will explore medieval life and thought through Chaucer’s masterpiece The Canterbury Tales paying close attention to its historical, cultural and literary contexts. Special consideration will also be paid to issues of gender and sexuality and how they inflect Chaucer’s poetics and politics, as well as to the role of Christianity in Chaucer’s works.  We will also reflect on Chaucer’s influence in the present day, including the BBC’s 2003 adaptions of the tales, poems from Patience Agbabi’s Telling Tales, and the Refugee Tales project, www.refugeetales.org. This course fulfills the “a” requirement.

LTEN 107

In this course, we will study formal experimentalism in modern and contemporary poetry.  Poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries can be characterized by a desire to break apart formal constraints and experiment with form, language, sound, and visuality.  The impetus for this experimentalism has varied.  British modernist poetry, for example, expressed a desire to break away from tradition, both aesthetically and culturally, while also seeking to use poetic form to contend with a fractured world.  We will thus ask if experimental poetry references a break between “tradition” and “modernity,” and if that modernity is marked more by optimism for the future or anxiety about technological, cultural, and social change.  We will also examine how the geographies of the British isles, the English language, and the postcolonial “commonwealth” affect the production of modern poetry.  How do the politics of English, British, and postcolonial identity inform how poets use language?  In the hands of postcolonial poets, is experimentalism a tool of resistance?

Please contact instructor for course description.

Metatheatre is a self-aware genre of drama, which calls attention to its fictionality, both in its themes and in its staging. Metadrama is a theatrical work in which a play appears within another play as part of its plot.

In this course we will learn about these genres and their development (internationally), and then we will focus on the works of Luigi Pirandello, a major, very unusual  Italian dramatist and novelist, who defied traditional theatre in the early 20th Century.  We will read and watch several plays and discuss the characteristics of the genre and of the individual works.  There will be short presentations, 2 "reading quizzes," and a final paper. For information, contact Adriana De Marchi Gherini at demarchi@ucsd.edu

LTEU 100 Europe

Plays from the 19th and 20th centuries as well as movies are studied to strengthen the skills developed in LTFR 2A. Continues the grammar review  started in LTFR 2A. Taught entirely in French. May be applied towards a minor in French literature or towards fulfilling the secondary literature requirement. Prerequisite:  LTFR 2A or equivalent or a score of 4 on the AP French language exam.

Emphasizes the development of effective communication in writing and speaking. Includes a grammar review. A contemporary novel and various media sources are studied to explore cultural and social issues in France today. Taught entirely in French. May be applied towards a minor in French literature or towards fulfilling the secondary literature requirement. Students who have completed 2C can register in upper-level courses. Prerequisite: LTFR 2B or equivalent or a score of 5 on the AP French language exam.

Please contact instructor for course description.

This intermediate-level course is conducted entirely in German and emphasizes the four language skills: speaking, listening, reading and writing while focusing on cultural awareness, developing higher level literacy skills and a review of grammar. Course activities include cultural readings on historical content as well as current events, discussion of films and classroom practice in the target language

According to recent surveys, multilingualism and cultural competency are essential elements in today's professional environment, starting with the job market, and their importance is growing fast.  In this course (the second part of the second year Italian series) we continue our journey through Italian regions, focusing on Italian food, travel, culture, traditions and people.  Italian grammar will be reviewed daily and tested in 4 quizzes and a final exam.  The course is in Italian, and it meets in person M-W-F and on Zoom on Tuesdays.  For information, contact Adriana De Marchi Gherini at demarchi@ucsd.edu.

First Year Korean 1B (5 units) is the second part of the Beginning Korean series. This course is designed to assist students to develop mid-beginning level skills in the Korean language. These skills are speaking, listening, reading, and writing, as well as cultural understanding. LTKO 1B is designed for students who have already mastered the materials covered in LTKO 1A or who are already in the equivalent proficiency level. This course will focus on grammatical patterns, such as sentence structures, some simple grammatical points, and some survival level use of the Korean language. Additionally, speaking, reading, writing, and listening comprehension will all be emphasized, with special attention to oral speech. Upon completion of this course, students will be able to do the following in Korean: 

Speaking: Students are able to handle successfully a variety of uncomplicated communicative tasks in straightforward social situations. Conversation is generally limited to those predictable and concrete exchange necessary for survival in the target culture. They are capable of asking a variety of questions when necessary to obtain simple information to satisfy basic needs.

Listening: Students are able to understand simple, sentence-length speech, one utterance at a time, in variety of basic personal and social contexts. Comprehension is most often accurate with highly familiar and predictable topics although a few misunderstandings may occur.

Reading: Students are able to understand short, non-complex texts that convey basic information and deal with basic personal and social topics to which they bring personal interest or knowledge, although some misunderstandings may occur. They may get some meaning from short connected texts featuring description and narration, dealing with familiar topics.

Writing: Students are able to meet a number of practical writing needs. They can write short, simple communications, compositions, and requests for information in loosely connected texts about personal preferences, daily routines, common events, and other personal topics.

Fulfills the following requirements: Pre-Requisite: LTKO 1A or equivalent level of Korean language proficiency

Second Year Korean 2B (5 units) is the second part of the Intermediate Korean. Students in this course are assumed to have previous knowledge of Korean, which was taught during the Korean 1A, 1B, 1C, and 2A courses. Students in this course will learn mid-intermediate level of standard modern Korean in listening, speaking, reading, and writing, as well as expand their cultural understanding. After the completion of this course, students are expected to acquire and use more vocabularies, expressions, and sentence structures and to have a good command of Korean in various conversational situations. Students are also expected to write short essays using the vocabularies, expressions, and sentence structures introduced. Upon completion of this course, students will become able to do the following in Korean: 

Speaking: Students are able to handle with ease and confidence a large number of communicative tasks. They participate actively in most informal and some formal exchanges on a variety of concrete topics relating to work, school, home, and leisure activities, as well as topics relating to events of current, public, and personal interest or individual relevance.

Listening: Students are able to understand conventional narrative and descriptive texts, such as extended descriptions of persons, places, and things, and narrations about past, present, and future events. The speech is predominantly in familiar target-language patterns. They understand the main facts and many supporting details.

Reading: Students are able to understand conventional narrative and descriptive texts, such as extended descriptions of persons, places, and things and narrations about past, present, and future events. They understand the main ideas, facts and many supporting details. Students may derive some meaning from texts that are structurally and/or conceptually more complex.

Writing: Students are able to meet a range of work and/or academic writing needs. They are able to write straightforward summaries on topics of general interest. There is good control of the most frequently used target-language syntactic structure and a range of general vocabulary.

Third Year Korean 130W (4 units) is the second part of the advanced Korean. Students in this course are assumed to have previous knowledge of Korean, which was taught in the Korean 2A, 2B, 2C and 130F courses. Students in this course will learn mid-advanced level skills in the areas of listening, speaking, reading, and writing in Korean, as well as expand their cultural understanding. Upon completion of this course, students are expected to acquire and use more vocabularies, expressions and sentence structures and to have a good command of Korean in formal situations. Students are expected to read and understand daily newspapers and daily news broadcasts. Upon completion of this course, students will be able to do the following in Korean:

Speaking: Students are able to communicate with accuracy and fluency in order to participate fully and effectively in conversations on a variety of topics in formal and informal settings from both concrete and abstract perspectives. They discuss their interests and special fields of competence, explain complex matters in detail, and provide lengthy and coherent narrations, all with ease, fluency, and accuracy. They present their opinions on a number of issues of interest to them and provide structured arguments to support these opinions.

Listening: Students are able to understand speech in a standard dialect on a wide range of familiar and less familiar topics. They can follow linguistically complex extended discourse. Comprehension is no longer limited to the listener's familiarity with subject matter, but also comes from a command of the language that is supported by a broad vocabulary, an understanding of more complex structures and linguistic experience within the target culture. Students can understand not only what is said, but sometimes what is left unsaid.

Reading: Students are able to understand texts from many genres dealing with a wide range of subjects, both familiar and unfamiliar. Comprehension is no longer limited to the reader's familiarity with subject matter, but also comes from a command of the language that is supported by a broad vocabulary, an understanding of complex structures and knowledge of the target culture. Students at this level can draw inferences from textual and extralinguistic clues.

Writing: Students are able to produce most kinds of formal and informal correspondence, in-depth summaries, reports, and research papers. They demonstrate the ability to explain complex matters, and to present and support opinions by developing cogent arguments and hypotheses. They demonstrate a high degree of control of grammar and syntax, of general vocabulary, of spelling or symbol production, of cohesive devices, and of punctuation.

Fulfills the following requirements: Pre-Requisite: LTKO 2C or equivalent level of Korean language proficiency

LTKO 130W Korean

LTKO 130W Asia

Please contact instructor for course description.

Vergil is a big deal, so it is fitting that he is the sole subject of this seminar. There is no more recognizable thing written in Latin than the Aeneid, his most famous (but not only!) poem. It is the national epic of the Roman people, one bound inextricably to the rise of Augustus and sole rule in Rome. The outsized impact of the Aeneid on the trajectory of epic poetry will be the blessing and curse that shapes this course. We will collectively reflect on what it means to read this poem now how to build on all those who have read it before us and how to situate it in the larger arc of Vergil’s life. 

LTLA 102

LTLA 102 Latin

LTLA 102 The Mediterranean

LTLA 102 Europe

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

LTRU 104C Russian

LTRU 104C Europe

Emphasizes the development of communication skills, listening comprehension, reading ability, and writing skills. It includes grammar review, compositions, and class discussions. This course is for students who began learning Spanish in a classroom environment. Students who have experience with Spanish outside of the classroom (at home, in their community) should take courses for heritage learners (LTSP 2D, 2E or 100B).

Review of major points of grammar with emphasis on oral communication and critical reading and interpretation of Spanish texts through class discussions, vocabulary development, and written compositions. It is a continuation of LTSP 2A. This course is for students who began learning Spanish in a classroom environment. Students who have experience with Spanish outside of the classroom (at home, in their community) should take courses for heritage learners (LTSP 2D, 2E or 100B).

Continuation of LTSP 2B, with special emphasis in speaking and writing. It includes discussion of cultural topics, grammar review, composition and presentations to further develop the ability to read longer fiction/nonfictional texts. This course is for students who began learning Spanish in a classroom environment. Students who have experience with Spanish outside of the classroom (at home, in their community) should take courses for heritage learners (LTSP 2D, 2E or 100B).

This course is designed for those students who learned Spanish at home and/or other students from Spanish-speaking backgrounds that have little or no formal training in the language. The main goals of the course are to enhance students' reading, writing, speaking and listening skills in a culturally relevant setting. Students also explore their cultural heritage and learn about Hispanic cultures in the United States and the language diversity of its speakers.

This course is designed for students who have been raised in a Spanish-speaking environment and speak some Spanish as a result of hearing it in the home, and in the community by family, friends, and neighbors, or some experience with Spanish in the classroom. The main goals of this course are to further develop and expand the Spanish language skills in reading, writing, listening, and speaking, while promoting a greater connection with the Hispanic cultures of the students' heritage.

This course is an advanced conversation and writing course for second language learners of Spanish. The objective of the course is to develop oral, reading and writing academic proficiency in Spanish. Students will explore a variety of cultural, literary and writing genres from the Spanish speaking world in both class discussions and writing assignments. This course has the purpose of preparing students to work in a professional context in Spanish. 

LTSP 100A Spanish

For students who learned Spanish at home and/or who went to school in a Spanish speaking country. This course allows students to expand their oral, reading, and writing academic proficiency in Spanish and, through class discussions, promotes critical thinking in a relevant cultural context for Latinx Students. Additionally, students will explore a variety of cultural, literary, and writing genres. This course has the purpose of preparing students to work in a professional context in Spanish.

LTSP 100B Spanish

Please contact instructor for course description.

LTSP 145 Spanish

This is a "golden age," one of the most creative and fertile and influential periods in the history of the West. In a Greek world that stretches from Europe to Asia to Africa, we find the beginnings of democracy, drama, philosophy, and history. We will together read, analyse, and discuss a selection of literary and philosophical texts that were produced between 480 BCE and 31 BCE, during the classical age of Athens and the Hellenistic period that followed Alexander the Great’s conquests and death. Among the assigned readings are tragedies by Sophocles and Euripides, a comedy written by Aristophanes, selections from the historians Herodotus, Thucydides and Plutarch, a dialogue of Plato, and part of the epic of Jason and the Argonauts. 

Grading will be based on attendance, participation in class discussion, and a series of short papers.

Gods, goddesses, heroes and queens, Amazons and monsters---the fabulous creatures of the classical world, many once divine, persist as myth into our present. The course will explore the pleasures of stories told of these characters from ancient Greece and Rome, in poetry and tragedy, and their survival into the Renaissance and the present. Readings include Homer's Odyssey, the Theogony, The Homeric Hymns, two Athenian tragedies, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, and a contemporary novel, Gods Behaving Badly.

LTWL 100

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LTWL 180

This course will research the synergy between US Independent filmmakers (soon to become “mainstream” ) and French “New Wave” directors of the 1960s. Were Martin Scorsese, John Cassavetes, Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, Woody Allen, David Lynch, Jim Jarmush, David Cronenberg, Gus von Sant, et al, inspired by Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, François Truffaut, Agnès Varda, Chris Marker, et al.? as much as they inspired them in return? The New Wave occurred during the efflorescence of cinema as the dominant art form of the XXth century and corresponded to the moment when the medium of cinema reached the apex of self-reflexivity. Leading American filmmakers have paid tribute to the spirit of the «New Wave» directors. All shared a passion for the history of cinema as they played with the rules of film language and style that came to be perceived as «Hollywood». Both New Wave and the «Indie» filmmakers are passionately defined by the Hollywood that they attempted to redefine. Theirs was the mythological Hollywood (which they embraced or resisted) of sublime directors and stars, the industry as well as its creativity, Hollywood’s overwhelming studio system as well as its «B» movies and obscure filmmakers.

The course will study in some detail (only) excerpts from a few of the legendary New Wave films (e.g. Godard’s Contempt, Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player, Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour, Varda’s Vagabond, Chris Marker La Jetée, et al.) and then highlight correlations with (only) excerpts from the likes of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, Allen’s Stardust Memories, Cronenberg’s Crash, Coppola’s The Conversation, Spielberg’s  Minority Report, and several others, —perhaps with a detour into the Munich (New Wave) School (e.g. Fassbinder’s The Bitter Trears of Petra von Kant.)

Students will explore more fully one of these correlations, with methods of film analysis and film composition (frame analysis, shot-by-shot study, narrative technique and filmic poetics) and interweave with XXth-century art, socio-history, and intellectual terrains —all the way to postmodern theory and theories of the digital era. 

LTWL 181

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In this course we will explore the practice of writing creative nonfiction in a variety of modes. Through reading and writing practices we will engage with craft issues particular to the genre of nonfiction such as the drive for verisimilitude, the distinction between "fact" and "truth," and the ethics of memoir. While ranging widely in our readings, we'll focus on observational writing (matter), the essay (mind), and memoir (memory) as three emblematic modes of nonfiction.

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

In this course, we will consider literature, art, and film from and about the Mexico-US border, focusing on post-1984 cultural production. Mindful of UCSD’s location, we will also actively factor into our own work the significance of living and writing in the Californias. Assigned texts may include work by BAW/TAF, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Gloria Anzaldúa, Luis Alberto Urrea, Sayak Valencia, Susan Briante, Cog•nate Collective, Natalie Díaz, Alex Rivera and Cristina Ibarra, Valeria Luiselli, Andrew Strum, Marcos Ramírez ERRE, and Omar Pimienta.

This course centers on the process and craft of writing memoir: personal narrative with the perspective offered by intentional reflection. We will read, reflect, and write together throughout the quarter in a course that balances craft analysis, generative writing, and workshop.

Please contact instructor for course description.

Please contact instructor for course description.

“The Scene of Instruction” - What particular challenges arise when teaching literary arts versus expository or critical writing? In this course, a hands-on practicum which forms part of a unique collaboration between UCSD and San Diego’s public arts magnet school, the San Diego School of Creative and Performing Arts (SDSCPA), students will consider the “scene of instruction” (to invoke the language of the poet Claudia Rankine) of the creative writing workshop. Participants will engage texts devoted to creative writing pedagogy, including possible work by Rankine, June Jordan, Lyn Hejinian, Junot Díaz, Felicia Rose Chavez, and Matthew Salesses. Alone or in teams, participants will develop lesson plans for craft workshops (reading/viewing/listening lists and writing prompts) and then put their plans into action in SDSCPA creative writing classrooms. Finally, each participant will produce a teaching portfolio that includes a statement of creative writing pedagogy ahead of their possible application to MFA programs or teaching positions in the field.

Ecopoetics in Trying Times

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This interdisciplinary course provides an advanced theoretical introduction to the study of religion and major debates within the field with a thematic focus on performance, myth, and ritual. 

Please contact instructor for course description.